Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management

Published febrer 8, 2008 | By Mayo

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.

Plone is easy to install. You can install Plone with a a click and run installer, and have a content management system running on your computer in just a few minutes.
Plone is easy to use. The Plone Team includes usability experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and mantain content.
Plone is international. The Plone interface has more than 35 translations, and tools exist for managing multilingual content.
Plone is standard. Plone carefully follows standards for usability and accessibility. Plone pages are compliant with US Section 508, and the W3C’s AAA rating for accessibility.
Plone is Open Source. Plone is licensed under the GNU General Public License, the same license used by Linux. This gives you the right to use Plone without a license fee, and to improve upon the product.
Plone is supported. There are close to a hundred developers in the Plone Development Team around the world, and a multitude of companies that specialize in Plone development and support.
Plone is extensible. There is a multitude of add-on products for Plone to add new features and content types. In addition, Plone can be scripted using web standard solutions and Open Source languages.
Plone is technology neutral. Plone can interoperate with most relational database systems, open source and commercial, and runs on a vast array of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and BSD.

Very large, active development team

Over the past twelve months, 84 developers contributed new code to Plone.
This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh, which lists most of the major open source projects in the world.
Over the entire history of the project, 219 developers have contributed.

Mature, well-established codebase

The first lines of source code were added to Plone in 2001. This is a relatively long time for an open source project to stay active, and can be a very good sign.
A long source control history like this one shows that the project has enough merit to hold contributors’s interest for a long time.